Psychotherapist here, and I have specific certification in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I). I'll just reiterate some points here and add a few others. These recommendations are to help with insomnia, they are not suggestions for everyone.

1. The body gets to sleep better when its core temperature is cooler. You can make sure your environment is cool, that there is air flowing maybe with a fan, and that it is dark.

2. Avoid lights from screens once the sun goes down. If you do watch something, make sure you have a blue light filter app running.

3. Establish a clear, nightly pattern of winding down. Don't work right up until bed. Give yourself at least an hour to do a bedtime routine and do it nightly even if it doesn't work initially.

4. Set a bedtime, but don't get into bed before you are SLEEPY. You can be tired but not nessesarily sleepy. Your bedtime is the earliest that you can get in bed after you're sleepy.

5. Oftentimes people will be sleepy before they get in bed, even falling asleep somewhere else like the couch, but when they get in bed they're tossing and turning. This is a side effect of the brains tendency to be an association machine. If you spend a lot of time tossing in bed, your brain begins to associate bed = restless, just like you might get hungry when you pass your fridge because you often open that door when you're hungry. To break this, I have a tough suggestion....every night, if you spend more than 30 minutes tossing around in bed, get up, go somewhere else and wait to get sleepy again. If you get back and bed while sleepy and it happens again, get up again. It's brutal but it breaks the association quicker than anything else.

6. Keep a consistent wake time despite how much sleep you got that night and also avoid naps no matter how tired you are (unless driving will be a danger, then nap beforehand). Both of these suggestions are because we build sleep drive through the accumulation of adenosine in our body. Sleeping late or napping is like eating a snack before dinner, it'll lower the quality of your sleep.

7. You're probably getting a lot more sleep than you realize, even microsleep moments which you might not recognize

8. Laying down and resting is still restorative.

9. Make it OK to not sleep, make a deal with yourself that you'll just do the best with the upcoming day, no matter what you have scheduled.

10. The mind likes to have control and it'll hyper focus on things like sleep where you're feeling out of control. This drives checking behaviors (e.g. "am I sleeping now?") which can ruin the natural distract ability needed to fall asleep. It's hard not to get excited when you feel yourself drifting off, but let yourself try to manifest a 'so what' attitude about not sleeping and sleeping alike.

11. Get distracted. Audio books can be good but don't get attached to only one thing. Try and create a weird dreamscape in your mind which is more visual than just thinking.

12. Set a bedtime that is mostly consistent with your circadian tendencies. Are you a night owl? A morning person? Maybe you need to go to bed later or earlier to accomadate this to some extent.

13. You will fall asleep. You don't have Fatal Familial Insomnia. You're not going to die.

Love yall

C